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I want to be able to like Ben Shapiro because I always hear about how smart and great he is. But I don't know how I can do this when I see him spewing nonsense like this.

How can someone who prides himself on facts and accuracy completely omit various school shootings, such as the Jan 23rd shooting in Kentucky, killing 2 and injuring 18? What's the consensus on this guy?

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He's a sophist, and despite telling everyone how he Went To Harvard as often as possible, makes garbage reactionary arguments. He worked for alt-right white supremacist rag Brietbart for a long time. There's no real reason to like him.

Shapiro’s thoughts about Arabs are all along similar lines. Usually conservatives are careful to draw a distinction: they are not condemning an ethnicity, but rather adherents to an ideology, namely Islamism. Not so with Shapiro: for him, the problem is not Islamism or even Islam writ large. It’s Arabs: “The Arab-Israeli conflict may be accurately described as a war between darkness and light. Those who argue against Israeli settlements—outposts of light in a dark territory—argue for the continued victory of night.” Arabs “value murder” while Israelis “value life,” and “where light fails, darkness engulfs.” Arabs are therefore, as an undifferentiated unit, a people of darkness. Palestinian Arabs are the worst of all: they are a “population rotten to the core… Palestinian Arabs must be fought on their own terms: as a people dedicated to an evil cause.” The “Arab Palestinian populace… by and large constitutes the most evil population on the face of the planet.” Since they’re “rotten to the core,” there’s no such thing as a good Arab: your evil is defined by your ethnicity, by being a member of the People of Darkness and Murder rather than the People of Goodness and Light. Again, it may just be my failure to understand Facts and Logic, but I am having trouble understanding how population-level generalizations about the moral characteristics of particular ethnic groups can be anything other than bigotry.

Shapiro once explained his actual preferred solution to the problem of the dark Arab hordes: mass expulsion. As he said, bulldozing Palestinian houses and subjecting them to curfews are insufficient “half-measures”: the only solution is to drive every last one of them forcibly from their homes and take their land:

The Arab enmity for Jews and the state of Israel allows for no peace process. The time for half measures has passed. Bulldozing houses of homicide bombers is useless. Instituting ongoing curfews in Arab-populated cities is useless… Some have rightly suggested that Israel be allowed to decapitate the terrorist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. But this too is only a half measure. The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership. Half measures merely postpone our realization that the Arabs dream of Israel’s destruction. Without drastic measures, the Arab dream will come true… If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution… It’s time to stop being squeamish.

Alright, well, we may disagree over whether pressuring Congress to pass a jobs bill makes you literally Mussolini. But Shapiro says the anti-Semitism part is clear-cut. Why? Well, the first piece of evidence is that when the Israeli military stormed an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, killing nine activists, the Obama administration soon released a statement saying that “The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained.” “How else are we to interpret [this] lightning-fast, knee-jerk anti-Israel response?” except as evidence of anti-Semitism, Shapiro asks. But perhaps you’re not convinced. Well, Shapiro has more. In 2009, Rahm Emanuel went to speak at AIPAC and told the audience that U.S. efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear program would be conditional on successful resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. This, Shapiro says, showed that Obama harbored a deep animus against Jews, because he holds Israel to a higher standard than he holds anyone else. And while it may have turned out that Rahm Emanuel never actually said anything like this, leading at least one other columnist to issue a correction, Shapiro stood firm. Not only did he not amend the story, but he later called Emanuel (who held Israeli citizenship for nearly two decades, whose middle name is literally Israel, and who even Jeffrey Goldberg thought made the idea of Obama being anti-Israel seem “a bit ridiculous”) a “kapo,” i.e. a Jew who does the Nazis’ bidding. Shapiro said that any Jewish person who voted for Obama was not really a Jew at all, but a “Jew In Name Only” serving an “enemy of the Jewish people.” They may “eat bagels and lox,” but by supporting an “openly” anti-Semitic administration they are “disgusting” and a “disgrace,” and the “twisted and evil” “self-hating Jews” who “enjoy matzo ball soup” and “emerged from a Jewish uterus” but nevertheless choose to “undermine the Israeli government” “don’t care a whit about Judaism” and in fact hold “anti-Semitic views.” (Those may be snippet-length quotes but go and read the columns if you suspect me of excising context or nuance.)

Shapiro isn’t interested in discussing any of this seriously. Just look at how he distorted his questioner’s response about moose: he says “Why aren’t you a moose?” and when she replies “That’s different,” he interjects “That’s right, men and women are different.” She clearly said that species and gender are different (which they are, in that there’s a good argument for revising one of the categories but not for revising the other). But he tried to convince his audience that she had essentially conceded his point, by seizing on and spinning the word “difference.” (We call this “sophistry” rather than “logic.”)

For a man who cares about Facts rather than Feelings, Shapiro doesn’t seem to care very much about facts. There are plenty of minor mistakes that cast doubt on the Times quote that Shapiro “reads books.” Some are just the little slip-ups that come from careless writing, e.g. the U.S. abolished slavery in “1862,” “atheistic philosopher Gilbert Pyle” [sic]. Others are suspicious unsourced generalizations, e.g.“Walk into virtually any emergency room in California and illegal immigrants are the bulk of the population.” But there are also major embarrassing bloomers, like Shapiro promoting the false rumor that Chuck Hagel received a donation from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” A New York Daily News reporter had made up the group’s name, as something so ludicrously over-the-top that nobody could possibly believe it, but Shapiro credulous enough to think the organization could exist, and published an article demanding answers. When it was pointed out that there was no such group, Shapiro did not retract the story. Instead, he doubled down, insisting that because he reported that sources said there was a Friends of Hamas, and the sources did say that, his reporting was sound. (Note: this is not how journalism works.)

Shapiro mocked T.I. for naming his children “Zonnique and Deyjah.” (It’s not clear what the Rational basis for disliking black names is.) When Barack Obama said that “we need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality and rewards men for theirs,” Shapiro wondered why Obama thought anyone should “be rewarded for their sexuality.” (I am curious how Shapiro did on the Logical Reasoning section of his LSAT if he believes “Don’t punish X or reward Y” means “reward X and/or Y.”) He thinks that criticisms of those who seem to love wars but decline to fight in them are “explicitly reject[ing] the Constitution itself, [which] provides that civilians control the military.” (Go ahead and try to figure out the reasoning on that one.) He was strongly against a federal ban on using cellphones while driving, because it would take away drivers’ freedom of choice, yet he believes it is “morally tragic” that we no longer use the police to stop people from making and watching pornography, because it follows the “silly” philosophy that “as long as what I do doesn’t harm you personally, I have a right to do it.” (Shapiro said that if pornography is legal, there would be no logical reason not to legalize the murder of homeless people, without addressing the potential meaningful distinctions between “having sex” and “killing a person in cold blood.”) Shapiro may be The Cool Kid’s Philosopher, but on the rare occasions when he actually dips his toe into metaphysics, the results are catastrophic: he argues that atheism is incompatible with the idea of free will because religious people believe that free will is granted by God. (“My beliefs say that your beliefs can’t be true therefore they can’t be true” is known as “assuming the conclusion.”)

What’s more, Shapiro doesn’t believe that criticizing the American government during a time of war ought to be legal at all. The champion of Free Speech has literally called for reinstating sedition laws. When Al Gore told a Muslim audience that he believed the United States’ indiscriminate rounding-up and detention practices after 9/11 were “terrible” and abusive, Shapiro called the statements “treasonable,” “seditious,” and “outrageous” and demanded that the law respond:

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say “enough.” At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition… Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions…. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, as well as allowing the prosecution and/or deportation of those who opposed the war…. This is not to argue that every measure taken by the government to prosecute opponents of American wars is just or right or Constitutional. Some restrictions, however, are just and right and Constitutional—and necessary. No war can be won when members of a disloyal opposition are given free reign [sic] to undermine it.

The Wilson administration’s crackdown on critics of the war, and the imprisoning of dissidents, were actually a low point in the history of American liberty, and the legal decisions upholding these acts are now discredited. But Shapiro sees this, along with the even more disturbing mass internment of Japanese Americans, as a model for eliminating critics of America’s wars. (Although elsewhere Shapiro has called the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Japanese detention “evil and disgusting.” Consistency, as I have indicated before, is not his forte.)

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I posted an article full of examples of Serious Thinker Ben Shapiro, but you seem dead set on ignoring that by making it about what posters on ST think rather than Shapiro's own words and arguments and insisting that your position is "inarguable" while insulting anyone who would disagree.

Stop making it about the ST posters and explain why anyone who has written what Shapiro's written as shown above should be taken seriously.

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He likes to create strawmen and then "destroy" them. See it in his YouTube videos, saw it in his debate with Cenk Uygur, see it in clips that I occasionally run across on Facebook. He typically will take an argument that someone makes, extend it well beyond the bounds of logic, using only his viewpoint as a basis for that extension, and then, based on his extension of the argument, he chides the original viewpoint as ridiculous. The biggest problem with trying to debate him is that once you've made an argument and he's gone off on his tangent, he refuses to accept anyone disagreeing with any of the myriad of additional premises he places in his counterargument.

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He likes to create strawmen and then "destroy" them. See it in his YouTube videos, saw it in his debate with Cenk Uygur, see it in clips that I occasionally run across on Facebook. He typically will take an argument that someone makes, extend it well beyond the bounds of logic, using only his viewpoint as a basis for that extension, and then, based on his extension of the argument, he chides the original viewpoint as ridiculous. The biggest problem with trying to debate him is that once you've made an argument and he's gone off on his tangent, he refuses to accept anyone disagreeing with any of the myriad of additional premises he places in his counterargument.

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Fit enough buzzwords in there? "There's no real reason to like him" from you means "He's conservative." Having talked and worked with the guy he's very nice and generous and a big Sox fan.

If you think Shapiro is dumb that's more of an indictment on yourself than him. The guy is freakishly smart whether you agree with him or not.

So raBBit, since you're clearly coming from a different position on him, what do you think about what I said in the original post? Where he claimed there were only 3 school shootings in January, and missed a bunch, including that pretty major one in Kentucky. Stuff like that rubs me the wrong way when he claims to be so fact-driven.

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Shapiro didn’t resign from Breitbart, despite ample evidence of its monstrous racism, until the victim of Breitbart’s thuggishness was a white female colleague in peril. And while Shapiro is no Milo, he has also said some vile things. There was, for instance, an October interview with ABC’s Nightline, in which Shapiro said transgender people suffer from “mental illness.” Or this 2010 tweet in support of Israeli settlements:

“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.” #settlementsrock

On Oct. 9, 2017, known as either Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day depending on which way you swing, the Daily Wire posted an animated video mocking the Native Americans who Christopher Columbus encountered when he landed in the West. The video portrayed Native Americans as savage cannibals and then displayed a ledger comparing their putative contributions to the culture of the Western Hemisphere with those of post-Columbus Europeans. The Native American column listed only three contributions: “dreamcatchers,” “tomahawks,” and “cannibalism.” On the Western culture side of the ledger were contributions such as “science,” “underwear,” and “not-scalping.”

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It is acceptable to agree with some of people's opinions and disagree with other parts of their views. I agree with Shapiro on a lot, but definitely disagree on stuff too. Everything doesn't have to be black and white.....

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I don't know who Ben Shapiro is but I know a lot of people on here don't like Maher. I watch his show and don't agree with everything he says or like it, but he's a smart guy. He's well read and educated and donates money to causes. Just some of his thoughts are way out there.

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Ben Shapiro busy giving a speech at CPAC reiterating just how much he loathes trans people and how Hollywood makes movies about rich white businessmen organizing terror attacks but never about Muslim terrorists.

A Serious Intellectual.

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Ben Shapiro busy giving a speech at CPAC reiterating just how much he loathes trans people and how Hollywood makes movies about rich white businessmen organizing terror attacks but never about Muslim terrorists.

Since China can’t be the enemy in American anymore movies due to the growing influence of box office here...the go to enemy is either random Middle Eastern Jihadists, North Korea or Russia in about 90% of movies.

Maybe Colombian/Mexican drug lords in the other 10%, or Somalian pirates.

Now that the students are using their experience to push for stricter gun control, Ben Shapiro wonders for National Review, despite the left’s rapt attention, “[w]hat, pray tell, did these students do to earn their claim to expertise?” “[High-school students from Parkland have] now been trotted out by advocates of gun control as newfound authorities on the evils of the Second Amendment,” Shapiro writes. “Are children innocents or are they leaders? Are teenagers fully autonomous decision-makers, or are they lumps of mental clay, still being molded by unfolding brain development?”

“The answer seems to be relatively simple: Children and teenagers are not fully rational actors,” Shapiro concludes. “They’re not capable of exercising supreme responsibilities. And we shouldn’t be treating innocence as a political asset used to push the agenda of more sophisticated players.”